


The Canticle of Anders, Stanza Ten, Verse One

by Cryptographic_Delurk



Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Andrastianism, F/M, Gen, Justice (Dragon Age) Positive, Post-Kirkwall, Religious Themes, Tevinter Imperium, my two archnemeses: Introspection & Exposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24886423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptographic_Delurk/pseuds/Cryptographic_Delurk
Summary: “You are here in the Imperium, after so long. Is it everything you’ve dreamed?”
Relationships: Anders & Justice (Dragon Age), Anders & Merrill (Dragon Age), Anders/Merrill (Dragon Age)
Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753798
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24





	The Canticle of Anders, Stanza Ten, Verse One

**Author's Note:**

> Expanding list of content warnings now includes ableism, misogyny, sexual harassment, and suicidality.
> 
> Thank you! If it suits, please Read & Relax.

Hawke had once again gotten him further than either of them ever could have expected.

Anders’s garments were shabby and, though he’d washed to the best of his ability, he was not unaware that the smell of mildew clung to him like gum. But the Tevinter Chantry amulet that Hawke had given him was apparently worth its weight in social currency, and a quick flash of it was enough to grant him entrance into Minrathous’s Grand Cathedral. No matter how little Anders might belong there.

It was not entirely unlike the way that Hawke had walked him straight onto Elthina’s pulpit in the Kirkwall Chantry the day he’d planted the bombs. No doubt the guards would have detained him, if he’d tried anything so brazen without the Champion at his side. Anders had come very far on the grace of others.

The comparison with the Kirkwall Chantry was apt in more ways than one. Positioned from the upland heights over a city of people it remained largely inaccessible to. Everything was gorgeous and gilded, and the sides of the cathedral were decorated in delicate stained glass renders of Andraste and Hessarian. You could believe this a beautiful city if you never left its Chantry. Meanwhile, those Minrathous’s slums were left to starve.

Anders felt Justice’s disgust – the same disgust they had felt every time they walked into Hightown. But there was also that sense of wonder. Anders watched the Black Divine light a beacon with the magic in her palm. He watched the clerics in her service do the same. And the onlookers in the audience were mages too. And that voices that sang the Chant never lingered, judgemental and accusatory, over the accursed contents of Transfigurations 1:2.

It had been a pipe dream, an act of churlish disrespect, when he’d stolen that set of Tevinter robes off a smuggler’s ship shortly before his stint in Amaranthine. His mind had always been on the places he’d come from and what he was running from, how angry the Templars would be to find him in robes that so clearly mocked their faith. Comparatively the places he might be going had been vague and indistinct, a promise of power and freedom he wasn’t sure he understood. Anders never thought he’d actually make it here to Tevinter. But here he was, seven years late, in the one place in the world, sandwiched between Orlais and the Qun, that mages could truly be free.

So long as you weren’t a slave, that was.

Anders and Justice sat in the back row, where they could not offend any of the magisters and other stuffed shirts attending the service. They listened, as the Black Divine recited Exaltations from the balcony:

_The vicious beasts lay down and were quieted  
The meek lambs became bold  
And rose up, casting aside their shepherds  
To dance at the Maker's feet._

They listened, and found it in themselves to hope.

==

In all of the possible futures Anders had dared to imagine when he and Justice blew the Kirkwall Chantry apart, in none of them did Isabela shove him down a gangplank in a foreign country, with nothing to his name but the clothes on his back, and send him careening into Merrill.

Merrill put up a surprising amount of resistance, but at the end neither of them was sure-footed enough, and they toppled down onto the wooden docks. Isabela was shouting something over them, but Anders only caught the end of it. “For good luck.”

“Oh dear,” Merrill said, once she’d caught her breath. She’d struggled to push him off, and Anders struggled to push through his own lethargy to drag himself to his feet. It took a moment for them to gather themselves and draw apart.

Isabela had not struck him the type for long goodbyes, and she had indeed withdrawn out of sight by the time Anders and Merrill made it onto their knees.

He’d expected Fenris to have moved on as well. But Fenris was only wearing the same scowl he always did. He crossed his arms, but otherwise waited patiently for them to get to their feet.

Merrill brushed herself off and then, after a nervous look to each side, wrapped her hand around Anders’s, and gave a determined nod to Fenris. And then both were moving up the dock, and Anders dragged behind.

Those three had been close, he knew. Or at least Fenris and Merrill had both been close to Isabela. He wondered, idly, if they had planned this. But Anders never asked. Only followed.

Anders had had a contingency plan back in Kirkwall, of course.

In his barest and purest sense of the future, in the only future that was _just_ , he hadn’t survived that night. The lives taken in the explosion of Kirkwall’s Chantry were to be paid for with the blood of their murderer. It was what Anders had been willing to pay to incite a Mage Rebellion, and keep Meredith from carrying out her Annulment in the quiet dead of night. This was simple. This was just.

Humans though, and perhaps even Spirits, were rarely so simple. Some equally true part of him, though beaten down with cynicism and very, very afraid, had hoped. Perhaps Hawke and Varric would understand and forgive him. And there would be more work to be do, the newly freed Kirkwall Mages to rally to the cause. They would need a place to go, and direction to rely on. Anders thought about what he might say to get through to them, and how they might respond, and he played and replayed these hypothetical conversations in his mind. He made note of different routes out of Kirkwall, and did not dismiss the possibility of the Deep Roads as much as he would have liked to. He packed a bag and stashed it under what might be charitably called a Lowtown garbage heap. The pillow his mother had given him was there, since Varric would not take it.

His plan, which had done everything he had hoped it would do for Circle Mages, did not accommodate himself quite so easily. Hawke had torn into him for escalating the situation past reason, and then torn into him for requesting she execute him. Varric would not even look at him. Sebastian had thrown a royal hissy fit, which was then followed up with a viscous row between Hawke and Fenris. Anders expected it to end with a repeat of Sebastian’s departure, but at some point their fury had turned cold and clear. Hawke said, rather flippantly, that she had thought freedom from slavery meant something to Fenris.

Fenris’s winced badly and gritted his teeth, and Anders thought his expression would have been better suited if Hawke had been driving tacks under his nails.

“Don’t make it complicated, Fenris,” Hawke had said.

And at once Fenris had composed himself. “I have changed my mind.” He glanced a little anxiously between the different members of their party, as if daring any of them to ask his justifications. Thankfully, nobody did, and Fenris turned back to Hawke. “Lead on. I am yours.”

The intensity of the arguments with Sebastian and Fenris had stolen all the air out of the sky. So by the time things got to Aveline, only the barest of grunts were exchanged. Quickly cut off when Isabela, jiggling her foot and bouncing the hand she had entangled with Merrill’s off her thigh, asked if they were going to get the show on the road or just bicker all day.

But it was hardly the end of the night’s surprises. There was Meredith, and the red lyrium, and Cullen, the prat. But there were also the mages, for whom Anders turned out to be less than a unifying character. Opinions were split on whether or not Anders had saved the hour and created a golden opportunity, or simply riled up the Templars and disturbed everyone’s evening for laughs. Perhaps most importantly, there was no need for such a divisive figure to lead anyone anywhere, not after Varric and Orsino reached an agreement, and the Mage Champion of Kirkwall was here to step up and do the job.

Then everyone had scattered.

Anders was not sure what he was doing or where he was going, when Isabela launched herself on his back in the middle of a cramped alleyway.

“You were very daring,” she purred. “But I heard you might be needing a quick and discreet way out of town, sweet thing.”

There had been too much else going on to resist. And Isabela snuck him back onto the docks, which remained a level of chaotic even with the day starting to break, and shoved him on a ship. He did not know how or where she’d gotten it from, and could not ask before she pushed him down into the hold.

“Good,” she said, voice suddenly hard and serious. “Stay there. I have to go get-” She cut herself off. “I’ll be back. Don’t move.”

He hadn’t. He was exhausted – the sense of loss too much.

He didn’t move when Merrill stumbled into the hold with a Tal Vashoth labourer, each carrying a side of that blasted mirror.

“Oh, hello, Anders,” she said, as they attempted to find a safe location to set it. “You’re a bit off-colour. But today was very exciting, wasn’t it?” But Merrill seemed distracted by her task, and quickly lost interest when he didn’t answer.

Anders didn’t move when the ship took off. Or when who he assumed were Isabela’s other hired hands dropped into the hold to shuffle boxes. Or when Fenris stalked down a day later, promptly startled, and threw a nasty stink eye at Isabela who was following close behind.

“What?!” Isabela feigned ignorance.

“Nothing,” Fenris said. “You’re just lucky you’re so pretty.”

“So I’ve been told,” Isabela agreed with a smile.

“Mage,” Fenris finally acknowledged him directly with a curt nod. Anders didn’t bother to return the gesture.

And then somehow a week had passed, with Anders only getting up to empty a chamber pot out the ship’s porthole. And he could feel Isabela’s patience with him wearing thin, as she and Merrill brought him drink and rations. She’d tried everything from lavishing him with compliments, to pulling rank as the ship’s captain, to prodding him in the ribs. And when it seemed like she was at her wits’ end, he asked her to do what Hawke would not and kill him.

Merrill went very quiet, and looked down to where her hands were crossed over her lap.

Isabela drew herself up to her full height instead. “You know why I don’t like you?” she fumed. “No matter how sweet your face and words and sparkly fingers are, you don’t care about anything I have to say. You’ll ask for things – a knife in your back, or a hand in a fight, or a fuck at the Pearl, or a ship to get you away from the Templars. But at the end of the day it’s not enough for you. It doesn’t matter to you that Kitten or I care about you, or that we made a space for you here, or that we think what you did was a little brilliant. Any encouragement I offer will never be as important to you as what Hawke and Varric think, because at the end of the day I’m just some pirate whore to you.”

Anders supposed it was just like Isabela to think she could just fix him and every horrific thing that had happened in Kirkwall with some flirting and flattery. And somehow it was his fault he couldn’t flip his moods on and off like a spell. But part of him felt unduly defensive when he slumped his shoulders and frowned up at her.

Isabela raised her arms in surrender. “I give up,” she declared. “I’m not going to kill you, Anders. And I’m not going to keep coming down here to feed you and pat your head and hold your hand until you feel like getting over yourself.” She turned sharply to Merrill, who was still sitting rigidly on the floor of the hull, wringing her hands. “And I can’t tell you what to do, but I suggest you stop enabling him too, Kitten.”

And Anders thought that was it, that he had finally driven away the last of everyone he had known in Kirkwall. He had worn them down, and he had always been worth less than nothing, and now everyone had given up on him.

Only Merrill hadn’t given up on him. She continued to bring him cups of watery rum, and wafers made of flour and offal. And she spoke, in the trade tongue or bits of Elvhen, simply to break the silence of his cloistered solitude. Even when he had nothing to say in return.

==

Merrill was not shy. The moment Varania was gone, and it was only the two of them, she pried up the floorboard. Fenris’s rucksack of gold was hidden there, at least insofar as it could be hidden when everyone who lived here knew where it was. Merrill stuck her hand inside and drew out a piece.

It was none of Anders’s business. He could not presume to understand the fiscal details of whatever arrangement Merrill and Fenris had come to. But Justice spoke up anyhow. “It is unjust to take what is not yours, and what has not been stolen from you.”

“Well, it’s happening,” Merrill said. “And if you want to tattle on me, then you can open your mouth and tell Fenris yourself.” She tilted her head to the side. “Have I mentioned I don’t really like being your go-between? I don’t understand why you think him so unreasonable you may not speak with him directly.”

Anders thought, more than anything, he was no longer sure how to talk to Fenris. He had long given up on ever winning Fenris to his side when he forced everyone’s hands the last day in Kirkwall. Yet that was the side Fenris had ended up falling on. And Anders felt, quite bitterly, that nothing Fenris had done since really fit in with Anders’s expectation of him. The Fenris that Anders knew was a strange creature who could be summed up with violent bloodlust, an irrational hatred of mages, and a poker face that made Diamondback games an exercise in frustration. He was not a person that snored in his sleep, or argued with his sister, or shivered when he pressed a wet wash cloth into the lyrium lined scars on his back. He did not do push ups in an empty room, or nearly collapse in on himself at the mention of Hawke or Isabela, or pay for Anders to be housed in a strange city without question or stipulation.

“He’s in a bad mood,” Anders said petulantly. “Maybe because you keep stealing his money.”

“He is back home in the land that had him enslaved, with a sister he does not understand,” Merrill corrected. “He is afraid. He’s said as much.”

She replaced the floorboard, approached to stand over him, and pressed the coin into his palm. “I think it should buy a lot?” she questioned herself. “Some fruit, meat. Maybe peas? And some of that fresh white cheese that looks like a sponge. It’s very good.”

“You’re sending me out to do your chores?” Anders, or maybe Justice, huffed. “And what will you be doing?”

“Looking for something,” Merrill said evasively. “And then I’m meeting up with Varania and the others just after dusk for lessons.”

Any further protest Anders might have invented was silenced when Merrill crouched down into his personal space. She fiddled with his hair, tightened the braid she’d woven into it earlier, and redid the tie. “There, very handsome,” she said, patting where the tip of the braid fell against his chest.

Anders tried to quash the heat in his cheeks by sheer force of will. He knew better. He knew he was being handled. Being babied.

“You know,” Merrill continued, “if you want to help you should take more of his money. I don’t know how Fenris plans to keep himself secret, he’s so very recognisable with that white hair and those marks. But he seems very worried about not having papers. If it’s you, you could find someone to pay for them.” Her nose wrinkled. “You could take extra and buy yourself some new robes too.”

His black feathered coat hung from a beam on the ceiling. But it was think and heavy and soaked from the wash, and it seemed it might never dry in this humidity. Nearly a decade ago he had run across frozen Ferelden in no more than thin silk, and now in the tropics all he owned was a heavy jacket.

“I can’t take his things,” Anders dismissed. “And who’s to say I want to help?” Although he felt Justice pull against the contrary question, and the second half of it came out quiet and hoarse.

“You do, though. You’re talking more. You’re feeling better.” Merrill peered into his eyes, searching for that electric blue. “And you’re getting impatient again.”

Merrill stood and retreated from him. She spent a moment digging through the pack by her bedside for her day clothes and armour, and then faced away from him to change. She seemed to do so proprietarily, rather than out of any particular sense of discomfort or modesty. When Anders thought about it, everyone here had reason to on some level be accustomed to the lack of privacy that came with communal living. But Anders felt it was a bit inappropriate the way he watched her anyhow.

She was so small and petite. He thought about how easily one of her buttocks might fit into his hand. How easy it would be to follow the valley of them, and press a finger or two up into her.

He also thought about how, at one point in his life, he wouldn’t have hesitated to cross the room and do it. He’d lost count of the number of people that had casually groped or slapped him across the rump while he’d been in the Circle, hurried to cop a feel while the Templars were looking away, and without ever asking permission. And how often he’d done the same to whoever caught his fancy. It was another one of those things that he remembered tinged with more poison than he’d experienced at the time. It was not that these casual harassments had ever truly bothered him (although doubtless there must have been some among them for whom they did). It was only how every Circle Mage had implicitly known that they were public property, and that they had better grab and pinch and kiss, and take whatever they could, before the Templars saw fit to do it for them. And that it had been so well ingrained, he hadn’t thought to question it until Velanna nearly ripped his head off one day for what he’d considered all-in-all a rather mild flirtation, and Justice saw fit to lay down the rules for a rather different law.

Justice had always been good at that, Anders thought fondly.

Only he wasn’t really coming through for the team now, was he? There were no Justice-like objections to the current course of action, as they sat there appreciating Merrill’s ass. Anders had once hardly been able to look at Merrill without thinking of the high cheekbones and austere bearing of the Blackmarsh’s Baroness. Which had been strange in of itself. The Baroness hadn’t left that much of an impression on Anders when he had met her, but Justice’s memories and disdain had been catching. Or so he had thought. Now Anders felt suddenly bereft, having been allowed this new freedom to observe Merrill as she was, without Justice’s mistrust to poison the view.

Anders found he didn’t much like it. Prodding Justice in his mind, he found an odd surge of gratitude. Merrill had looked after them. Merrill had wanted Anders alive even when Anders himself was unsure of the prospect. Maybe that was important. Maybe it was unjust to not at least attempt to judge Merrill on her own merits.

Anders felt this was terribly unfair. Justice made rules and set boundaries and made Anders certain of them, but now they were both being equally wishy washy and impressionable. Were they both really so foolish they’d fall for anyone who, taking advantage of a moment of weakness or lapse in judgement, showed them the barest sliver of kindness?

The answer was yes. The other answer was that hadn’t Anders done the same, in using his magic to heal the sick and poor and vulnerable and hoping, in spite of himself, that it might change their minds about magic. The other other answer was hadn’t Justice himself done the same, when he’d reached out to Anders not long after a year of solitary confinement and affirmed a rather desperate man that not only was what had happened wrong, it was so wrong they had a joint responsibility to make sure it never happened to another mage ever again.

None of these answers put Anders in even slightly a better mood.

Anders considered the coin in his hand, and what he had to do.

“What was it you said to me about the mages in Kirkwall?” Anders asked facetiously, as Merrill strapped her staff to her back. “These are not my people? This is not my fight?”

“I was wrong,” Merrill answered immediately, and with a startling amount of finality. “And in the end I fought for them anyhow. And so did Fenris, no matter what nonsense he says,” she scoffed.

Anders felt Merrill had always been a bit more permissive with Fenris than with him, perhaps out of solidarity with other elves. So he felt a bit vindictively pleased to hear her so openly frustrated with him.

But before he could come to really savour the moment, Merrill rounded on him. “Do not think you have me fooled, lethallin,” she announced. “You know what is just. And you will do it in the end.”

She left before Anders could argue with her. Although there wasn’t really anything to argue with.

Anders struggled with himself, and then began to crawl towards the loose floorboard. He met a surprising amount of resistance and-

“Oh, for the love of Andraste’s great big bustier!” Anders protested to the empty room. “I’m not going to steal-!” At least not more than Merrill had already made him complicit in. “I’m just going to take a look!”

The rest of the crawl remained a struggle, whether because of Justice’s objections or Anders’s own listlessness. But eventually he pried up the floorboard and checked what was stowed underneath.

Fenris’s bag of gold was still nearly full. Anders found it hard to believe he’d managed to hold onto this much money in Kirkwall, when it had seemed that every copper Anders had earned had slipped through his fingers like water. But neither could Anders think of anything Fenris might waste coin on – no cause, not even a hobby. Maybe he’d saved it all, consciously or otherwise, in anticipation of being in this place, in anticipation of this moment.

But something caught Anders’s eye beneath the pack, and he pulled it to the side to reveal a thin leather bound book.

Fenris had precious few books on him. Frankly it was a bit of a surprise, given how fast Fenris must have had to pack, that he brought any books with him at all. But Anders had seen him pore over a series of war records and treaties regarding the Qunari, a farcical stage play about a group of lovers trapped in an enchanted forest with a bunch of mischievous spirits, and a manual on how to breed and care for Mabari pups that came complete with diagrams and illustrations. Anders supposed a more generous person might read into the significance of these picks, and what they said about the man who chose them in his last fleeting hours in a burning city. But Anders tried his best not to give it any thought.

He did the same when a precursory glance inside this fourth hidden book revealed it to be a copy of the Canticle of Shartan. It had been something often alluded to in the books that filled Anders’s youth, usually in disparaging terms as Chantry scholars rushed to pre-emptively discredit its authenticity. But apart from whatever could be gleaned about it from these secondary accounts, it had been resolutely banned from the Circle Tower Library, so Anders had never before seen a copy of the text itself.

It should be a while before anyone was back. Before he had to go grocery shopping for Merrill. He clasped the book by its spine and drew it out from under the floorboards entirely.

It was not wrong to borrow, Justice reasoned. Though it would be better to ask first.

Anders sat back, lifted the book up, and began to read from the middle:

_Some among you wish to flee back to your masters,  
To throw yourselves at their feet and ask forgiveness.  
You have left that path. It is already gone.  
If you would live, and live without fear, you must fight._

==

Anders was two days out on the Waking Sea, before he got out of his own head enough to realise that he’d never gotten to retrieve the throw pillow his mother had given him all those years ago.

He had accounted for many futures in which the pillow never left it’s hiding place under the garbage heap. And while this possibility had not seemed so offensive under the circumstances of his death – a journey where no earthly object might accompany him- it seemed catastrophic that he was here now on an entirely different voyage without it. And on the unlikely chance that Isabela would consent to turn the blasted ship around, it seemed even more unlikely that the pillow was still where he left it – untouched by the mobs and fire and scavenging that had characterised those last few hours in Kirkwall.

 _This is why he had told Varric to take the damn thing_! And Anders was surprised to feel something a lot like anger bubbling in him. He tried to suppress it, because Varric had had every right to disavow him and snub him. But no sooner had the feeling cooled, when it resurged with an extra helping of Justice. Justice had never been quite as fond of Varric as Anders had been, and Anders was quickly reminded that Varric had refused to take the pillow while they were still friends. That the things Anders had done for Varric and Bartrand had in the end not been worth taking his request and cause and suffering seriously.

 _It wasn’t like that_ , Anders thought. He knew that Varric had simply not wanted to play part in his self destructive impulses.

But part of him doubted and fumed. And not only the part that was Justice.

Anders had not always coveted the pillow with such a single mindedness. He’d even left it behind during his first few escape attempts out of Kinloch – it would hardly have been practical to take it for a swim in Lake Calenhad. But sometime following his third escape attempt, after coming to the realisation that there was no home to return to, only the bunk the Templars always dragged him back to where only a singular possession waited for him, the pillow had started to take on symbolic meaning. At some point in time, there had been a boy with a name and a family. And Anders had once been that boy. And, if not for the Chantry and the Circles, that boy might still have that name and that family, along a whole host of opportunities and no need to live flitting from one place to the next, ghosting through people’s lives for fear of the inevitable need to leave them.

But with the pillow gone, he felt rootless and adrift, cut off completely from who he was and who he might have been. It was hard to even remember more than bits of his childhood and, without the physical proof of it, it was no more real than all the other contradictory things he had been.

He’d been so afraid once, of becoming a demon. Taken such pride in his asceticism and conscience of character, of all the things that separated him from the other corrupted denizens of the Fade. He’d been so afraid to _want_. And he wanted so many things now – justice and vengeance and pity and glory and freedom and affection and love and a home. He had grand ambitions and quiet dreams. And he wanted to live, to feel more of this bright, beautiful, ugly world. He wanted Anders to live. Even if it was unjust.

And Anders considered that the boy whose mother knitted him that pillow could only ever have been one thing. And the person he was now was so many things. He was Anders. He was Justice. He was Spirit, Demon, Abomination. And even tiny bits of Kristoff. He was not of Mortal Men, and filled with the Darkspawn Taint. And even if he had the chance to take it all back, he didn’t think he would. Because he’d once been so entrenched in powerlessness and cowardice and ignorance. And even if it was wrong for Anders and Justice to want more for themselves, they could be certain it was not wrong for them to have the compassion to want more for one another.

Anders wondered if the loss of the pillow was just the reality of that. That he and Justice would forever be dropping parts of who they once were at the side of the road, until they were forgotten entirely in the face of this terrifying unknown they were transforming into. He let himself mourn them – the Anders who’d believed that compassion was more important than change, the Justice who’d believed that principles were more important than living. They had been good people, and could not have known how wrong they were.

==

The parishioners were leaving the Cathedral – happy families chatting about where they might break their fast. Anders was many things, but he could not be one of them.

He found himself lingering behind, studying the pamphlets left in the pews. There were the verses, annotated with the officially recognised interpretations, and translated between the archaic script of the Chant, the common tongue, Orlesian, Ander, and Tevene. Anders wondered if the conspicuous lack of Qunlat was pointed.

He pocketed a couple of them – _No, this isn’t stealing, Justice. They’re meant to be taken and spread around, like a manifesto._ – and then wandered to look at the altars lining the sides of the Church, alit with softly glowing runestones.

They were filled with incense and prayers and offerings, and Anders tried to open himself up and feel. If the Maker was here, any more than he was in the Chantry in Kirkwall, or the prayer hall in Kinloch Hold, Anders couldn’t tell. Of all of them, Amaranthine’s Chantry had impressed him the most. In that silent night he’d spent huddled, waiting for the second wave of darkspawn, with people who were still alive and clinging to one another despite all odds. But what if the Warden Commander had listened to Constable Aiden and firebombed the city, Chantry and all? _The Maker wouldn’t have lifted a finger if the Commander had taken the place to the torch. It wasn’t on His grace that those people survived instead._

Anders was pulled unpleasantly from reminiscence by the approach of a Chantry Sister. She stopped a few feet from him, clasped her hands and tilted her head down in an apologetic gesture. She had shoulder length black hair, and a friendly round face.

“May I ask where you came across that amulet?” she asked, in a heavily accented rendering of the common tongue. “I have not seen many of its make.”

You caught more flies with honey.

“It was a gift from a friend,” Anders replied.

“And what was that friend’s name?”

Anders hedged a moment, before offering Hawke’s given name.

The sister did not seem to recognise it. “Interesting. I wonder how they came about it. It’s quite a rare piece. If you don’t mind?”

Anders unwrapped the amulet from his neck and, still holding tightly to the chain, lifted it up in his palm so she could see.

“If you look here, you can see a bit of skin preserved in the glass,” she pointed with a cleanly trimmed fingernail, at what Anders had always assumed was a blemish in the design. “It’s a relic of one of the Archon Saints. I’d guess Orentius.” She stepped back, and did not stop Anders from replacing the amulet around his neck. “I would expect to find it in the hands of one of Tevinter’s great households, not with a foreigner. Do you have any idea where your friend might have gotten it?”

Anders had never thought to question this before. It was well known, at least among his friends and associates in Kirkwall, that no matter how high Hawke climbed on Kirkwall’s social ladder, she had never successfully let go the paranoid hoarding that characterised her time as a starving refugee. Hawke would dig through every garbage heap she came across and, even if these pursuits usually turned up nothing more than torn trousers and broken glass, if you sifted through enough rubble you were eventually bound to find some gold. Anders had assumed the amulet one such nugget.

But now Anders was feeling far less certain of that. When had Hawke delivered him this relic? After that debacle in the Fade with Feynriel? Which was after that ugly confrontation with Petrice? Which was after Hawke had gone with Fenris to-

“She must have purchased it secondhand somewhere,” Anders offered. Justice seemed peeved by what only barely avoided being a lie for a large amount of wishful thinking, but also resigned to the necessity of it in this instance.

“The last time I saw anything similar to this was around the wrist of Magister-”

Anders did not listen to the name.

Justice did.

“I only met her a few times, but she was so warm and clever. It’s a shame what happened to her. Although I suppose that’s what comes with associating with fringe elements like Magister Danarius.”

It was strange hearing that name rendered in such a heavy Tevene accent. It almost sounded like a different name entirely. Anders could almost pretend.

“But even for his false prophets and strange fascinations, it is a pity. I suppose we must all return to the Maker’s side some day. But brutalised by his own slave, so far from home? Nobody deserves that.”

Anders had, in a few of his more bitter moments, found himself pitying Danarius for having the misfortune to know Fenris. Of having to deal with someone so bigoted and recalcitrant and pigheaded. He’d known Danarius for all of ten minutes, after all. And while most of it consisted of them trying to brutally murder each other, it had hardly been personal. Contrast Fenris, who Anders was well acquainted with, who Anders knew to be a giant pain in the ass.

But whenever he had indulged that odd pity in Kirkwall, it was in the knowledge that every single one of his friends and acquaintances would shut him down quicker than he could get out a sentence. And even Anders had understood the conceit. Anders could pity Danarius because he hadn’t known him, and beyond that Danarius was not someone worth knowing. Nothing about him could possibly mean more than the fact that he’d taken a teenage boy from his family and sliced him open for sport.

Everyone in Kirkwall had understood that.

“I suppose I’m not making much sense,” the sister said. “Bothering a foreigner with all these names and internal politics. There are only a few hundred Atlus lines in Tevinter, and us Chantry Sisters working out of the capital are expected to know all our families. If you ever have any questions, you are free to ask any of us. Although-”

The sister continued. And it took Anders a moment to realise he was panicking. He did not know when this sister had gone from mildly irritating to wholly offensive. And he had probably said too much, and given away too much. And if she was coveting his amulet, and if she had him followed- He tried to stop his eyes from darting for an escape, but it was no use. It was like trying to look a Templar in the eye.

And then his shoulders seized, postured straightened. His vision clouded slightly, like he was looking through a veil. And it was a struggle not to just follow the urge to retreat back into his mind, when this happened, but Anders forced himself to stay put.

“We have already indicated we do not know where our friend procured this amulet,” Justice quipped, cutting the sister off mid-sentence. “Is there a reason for your questioning? Do you intend to detain us?”

At least Justice seemed calm. But even so the sister was less perturbed than Anders thought he would have been in her shoes, staring down an abomination.

“Well, no-” she flushed.

“Then cease this,” Justice said. He frowned a moment, before adding, “Your faith is built on blood and bone and sand.” He did not wait for a response before steering their body stiffly to the grand doors and out into the plaza.

Outside was cloud of doves, and Justice weaved between the people and followed them out the district. And at some point, his stiff march turned into Anders’s hurried, loping gait. They turned several corners, until they found a busy street where they could get lost in a crowd.

“Yeah, great job there,” Anders muttered. “She won’t think that’s suspicious at all.” But, even though Anders would probably have to double back a few times and make sure he wasn’t being tracked or followed, really he was relieved for Justice’s intervention. Grateful even. Justice seemed to take this in the spirit it was offered.

Reasonably they couldn’t go back to the Chantry after that though. At least not that one. Yet another way he was cut off from the Maker.

It hurt more than Anders reasonably thought it should.

He’d always taken a hard line on Andrasteism in his conversations with Prince ‘Andraste’s Crotchpiece’ Sebastian. He’d had to. In the same way he’d had to take an opposing hard line with Merrill’s flighty Dalish misconceptions about spirits and demons.

But neither was here to be defensive with, so Anders let himself slip into the uncomfortable grey area where he simply felt lost and abandoned and unsure what he had done to provoke it.

“Don’t you ever resent it? That the Maker abandoned you to dote on mortals?” he asked Justice. And while according to scripture that resentment was the distinction between spirits and demons, it was a distinction that did not seem so significant when Anders was simply talking to a fellow person. “I think I would in your place,” he admitted.

There was no way for Justice to answer, without taking over their body. There was a pause, as Justice seemed to weigh the permission being given.

Justice inhaled softly. Anders could see the glow flare and die on their hand. But you could almost think it a trick of the light with the way the searing white Tevinter sun bleached the surroundings.

“The Maker turned his back on mortals as well,” Justice said. “Perhaps it says more about him than either of us.”

It was not really an answer, but it made Anders feel better all the same.

Anders felt for the Tevinter Chantry amulet and drew a calloused thumb over its smooth surface. It was sentimental, although Anders wasn’t sure how he felt about it, in light of recent revelations.

He tucked it under his shirt. He’d been struggling with questions about faith and sentimentality and injustice for decades. In all likelihood they weren’t questions that would be answered today.

There were things he could get answers about though. And there was time enough before he had to be elsewhere.

Anders ripped the Sigil of the Mage Underground off his coat and polished it with his thumb. And so long as he was cannibalising his coat for the cause, he ripped out a tan flap of leather from the underside. He hadn’t been on particularly good terms with the Mages’ Collective the last he’d heard from them, and part of him doubted they had contacts this far north of Ferelden. But the image of their sigil was burned into his brain, and he recreated it with a searing finger against the leather flap.

Nobody in the street balked at the small display of magic. It was something Anders wished he could get used to.

==

A few hours later, Anders found himself in a private room at a public house seated across a cowled man at a card table. Two more were asleep in the four poster bed, apparently they worked late shift.

He drew a line of healing magic over the spirit burn that had been slashed up his arm, and watched the skin regain its usual flush pink and the patch of gossamer golden hair regrow as if it had never been gone. One minor scuffle, a few apologies, and far too much of a fuss later.

“If you go around yapping about all our business and flashing those symbols everywhere, you should probably expect some backlash,” the man scolded. He spoke in a subdued Orlesian accent.

“And if you’d led with that instead of attempting to manhandle me, maybe you wouldn’t invite backlash yourself,” Anders huffed. “I hardly see how this is all on me given the scene you’ve caused.”

“You know your face is plastered on wanted posters across half of Thedas?” the man asked. “They’re blaming you for the uprisings in Starkhaven and Ostwick and who knows where else by now. The Mage Underground is in shambles.”

“Only because it’s overground now,” Anders mumbled.

The man cut him off. “Quite frankly, you’re the least discreet man I’ve ever met.”

“And I’m only getting worse at discretion every day.” Although this wasn’t precisely true. There had been a time when Justice couldn’t have managed a lie to Ser Pounce-a-lot if it would save his life. If you looked at it that way, they were only getting better at it.

“You know, a lot of mages are of the opinion that we don’t have much need of your grandstanding. What’s to stop me from turning you in, collecting that fat bounty on your head, and repurposing it towards something the Underground can use?”

Anders could feel Justice’s outrage pulling at him, but it proved surprisingly easy to ignore. Talking to this man reminded Anders a little of talking to a Templar. He leaned lazily back in his seat, the casual irreverence coming to him with a practised ease. “I don’t know. Why don’t you?”

“Maybe because I know you’re an abomination, and would have me burnt to a crisp before I even got the chance to try,” the man said. “Or maybe it’s because I actually have some respect for what you did. You can take your pick.”

Justice calmed. Anders found himself oddly flattered.

He considered this for a moment. “Can I get your name?” he asked the cowled man.

“No,” was the curt response. And then after another beat. “Well, you wanted an audience, didn’t you? Now you have one. Isn’t there anything else you’d like to ask?”

“I’ve been a bit out of the loop. Any news of our plight is appreciated.”

“So far as I know it’s just bloody revolution everywhere,” the man said. “It’s a few months delay to get reliable word of anything happening outside the Imperium, it stands so isolated from the rest of Thedas in many ways. But talk to any of the nobles here and they’ll take voyeuristic pleasure in relaying the details of southern mage slaughter to you. They love talking about how barbaric and uncivilised the rest of Thedas is.”

Anders snorted his agreement. No surprise the nobility was the same everywhere. “Well, it looks like I might be here for a while. Nobody waiting for me anywhere else except a bunch of headhunters.” He leaned forward in his seat a bit and coughed into his hand. “And… I’d sent mages north to Tevinter, but given the disjointed nature of the Underground my contacts were mostly pit stops in Nevarra and Antiva and Rivain. I realise I don’t really have a clue what the status of the Underground is here.”

“We sneak people in,” the man shrugged. “It’s easy enough to blend in with the refugees, harder to blend in elsewhere. You know how the Orlesians and Marshers got wise to us attempting to pass mages off as scribes? I guess you could say it’s the same here. Nobody trusts a broke foreigner with an odd talent for literacy. Only here being good with a bow or a sword isn’t the same kind of cover.” The man snorted. “I’ll never understand how the White Chantry got everyone convinced that the ability of a marksman is some Maker given gift to non-mages.”

“Well, it helps if you lock everyone in a tower when they’re babes. Hard to attend target practice or hunt deer in the middle of a library.” Though Anders had had the opportunity to go hunting with his father at the tender age of ten. He’d just never shown much talent for it.

“Oh, save it. You’re preaching to the choir,” the man grumbled. He leaned back and reached for the canteen on his belt. “The biggest issue is Tevinters keep better birth records than the rest of Thedas. You have to, when bodies are property. Lots of patrols and slavers around ports and borders, waiting to catch anyone who can’t claim citizenship. It’s a bit easier once you’re in. It’s not exactly nice to clutter up your uptown streets with headhunters ready to interrogate every passing human about whether they should be put to the auction block. But if you end up at the wrong place at the wrong time and give the state police a reason to look into you, well…” The man shrugged.

There was a sharp jerk on his consciousness, and Anders felt his attention drift to one specific detail at Justice’s behest.

“Every passing _human_?” Anders asked. “I guess they wouldn’t hesitate to stop an elf.”

The man gave him a withering look. “The Underground doesn’t _send_ elves here. Not unless they’re suicidal.” He shrugged. “That’s about it. Unless you’ve got a talent for counterfeit, or money to pay the dwarves to make counterfeit papers for you, I’m not sure any help you could provide would be worth the risk.”

The pieces of this conversation began to coalesce in a strange whole in Anders’s mind.

“So you’re telling me the biggest threat to mages here in Tevinter is… slavery?” he snorted. _Of course. Of course._ “It’s-”

 _Ironic_ , Anders had been about to say. But when he thought about it, it really wasn’t. Fenris had always made the plight of mages and slaves seem diametrically opposed. But you only had to look so far as the man’s sister to know he walked around wilfully blind.

“It’s _what_?” The man demanded. “Something funny to you?!”

“It’s nothing,” Anders placated. “Only I have an acquaintance who would be very surprised to hear it.”

“Are they a mage?”

“No?”

“Well, no surprise there,” the man huffed. “Since when have outsiders known a bloody thing about what we face?”

“I’d drink to that,” Anders laughed. Although it was probably good that nobody hurried to hold him to that promise. Justice wouldn’t like it.

The laughter died, and Anders sat there for a moment. He adjusted his belt, rocked his chair as he balanced it on its back legs, and tried not to pout. The cowled man said nothing, and for all intents and purposes it seemed the meeting was over.

He could feel Justice’s insistence pushing him though. Or maybe it was only his own impatience, as Merrill had called it. Like a flashing light that would always draw him back.

“Look, uh-” Anders coughed. “The people you get to smuggle mages in… If you know who they are, you can only be one degree of separation, tops, away from the people who smuggle slaves out…”

Anders felt the anticipation thrum on his skin. Maybe the man would know nothing. Or maybe this was it. Maybe even asking this question would set him down another unavoidable collision course, each discovery spurring him further and further forward.

“The rumours do you justice.” The man shook his head wearily. “You really got a death wish, don’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Anders agreed. Sometimes for a day. Sometimes for months and months on end. But not today. And the Calling hadn’t come for him yet. “Not today.”


End file.
